456 
Extracts from British and Foreign Journals, 
THE NATURAL SOURCE AND PHYSIOLOGICAL ACTION OF 
THE WOORARA POISON. 
At a recent meeting of the Medical Society of London, a 
paper was read by Dr. Cogswell, on the Woorara poison of 
the Indians. He remarked that previous to 1852, when he 
published a series of experiments on the subject, only a 
few scattered instances were known of the power possessed 
by a numerous section of the class of dynamic poisons of 
paralysing the part to which they are immediately applied. 
Opium and hydrocyanic acid had been observed to paralyse 
the hind leg of the frog; aconite and the viper’s poison to 
cause numbness of the tongue, and ticunas instantaneously 
to stop the peristaltic motion of the bowel of a guinea-pig. 
The propriety with which the last effect was attributed by 
Messrs. Morgan and Addison to paralysis appearing doubtful, 
and the author being also desirous of including the ticunas 
among the substances whose local action had been investi- 
gated, he had procured some of this poison for examination. 
There was much obscurity connected with the name, the 
natural source and physiological action of the South 
American arrow poison. It was severally called urare, curare, 
woorara, woorali, and ticunas. The first w^as supposed by 
Humboldt and Sir R. Schomburgh to be the term employed 
by Raleigh ; but, though the poison itself vras mentioned 
in Raleigh’s ‘ First Voyage to Guiana,’ the w r ord “ourari” 
only occurred in the Appendix to the account of the Second 
Voyage, which w r as performed by Captain Keymis, and there 
only as one of the names of poisoned herbs. “ Curare” was 
the name employed by Humboldt himself, and w^as preferred 
on the Continent ; but the author was unacquainted with its 
origin. “ Woorara,” was used familiarly by Bancroft, in 
1769? who said the poison w as so called from the name of a 
twdning plant which furnished its chief ingredient; and, as it 
was adopted by Brodie, and had become current in our 
language, it w ? as thought to deserve the preference. 
“ Woorali” was a corruption of woorara by one of the 
Indian tribes. “ Ticunas” was simply the name of a tribe 
on the Amazon, w 7 hich prepared the poison, and need not be 
retained, except (as with other drugs) to indicate a particular 
manufacture, as the Macusi or Wapisiana Woorara of the 
Orinoco, the Lamas or Ticunas Woorara of the Amazon, &c. 
